Boot from external HDD

Restart your computer with the USB drive connected, and press the blue "Access IBM" button on your keypad. Select "Startup Utility" and go to "Boot Order." Change "USB Device" to "Primary," save changes and exit. When your system reboots, it should boot from the USB drive.

Try putting on a flash drive on another computer but just copy,do not activate or run, or borrow an external CD drive .

Have you tried booting in Safe Mode?

Turn off the computer, then hit the power button to turn itback on and immediately start hitting the F8 key repeatedly until you see SAFEMODE. Take the Safe Mode option and let it boot up. Safe Mode will lookdifferent to you, the screen will be darker and the icons bigger, this isnormal.

Back up your most important data to an external storage device in case anything goes wrong while changing the BIOS settings. Remove any disc that is currently inserted in the IBM Thinkpad X41's disc drive.
2-Shut off the Thinkpad X41 laptop. Turn the laptop back on and wait for the "To interrupt normal startup, press the blue Access IBM button" message to appear on the screen.
3-Tap the blue Access IBM button at the top of the keyboard. Click the "Access BIOS" button when the "Rescue and Recovery" menu appears.
4-Click "Yes" and wait for the BIOS to load. Type in the current BIOS password for the IBM X41 and press Enter.5-Navigate over to the IBM's "Security" heading by tapping the right arrow key twice. Scroll down to the "Supervisor Password" listing and press "F5."6-Type the IBM's current BIOS password and hit Enter. Leave the next field blank if you want to completely remove the BIOS password, or instead type in a new password to replace the old one. Press Enter.7-Press "Escape" and then highlight "Restart" and press F5. Navigate to "Save changes and Restart" and press Enter.

It makes no difference what brand of hard drive you have in the laptop, the original is going to cost you maybe 2 or 3 times or more the price of a generic drive.

Need to know the type from the laptop (4numbers) and also model, they are on the bottom sticker most likely.

post the details and I'll see what it can take.

Thanks

yes

Yes you can install more memory capacity harddisk easily.
You get not effect on performance

Without a windows cd or recovery it is very hard. You should take some cd from somebody. At other hand, you can connect your hd to another pc and try program - hdd regenerator- on it.

Hi,
After plugging ur HDD, verify the device is detected or not in Device manager and Try Partitioning Again GUI mode (means in XP).. or follow the steps..

1- Go to Computer Management, Click Disk Management
2 - You will find you External HDD in the Right side
3 - Just Right Click the Drive, if it asks Initialize HDD, just Initialize and Create Partition as u like.

Have Fun
- Rajkumar

The answers are maybe, and yes.

If your internal hard drive is nearly full then adding an external hdd and transfering some of the files to it will free up space on your internal hdd and potentially improve performance.

You can install programs and store files on the external hdd. Obviously it will need to be connected in order to run these programs and access the files.